Bev Tappan

Category: Bird Poems

Lifted by flight and song

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: A PAUSE BY A POND

    A PAUSE BY A POND

    We stop to sit awhile beside

    Our pond, the asters to admire

    (The royal purple, not the white)

    And note the scarlet-turning sumac,

    Hoping we may hear the flap

    Of slow-descending heron wings

    Or hasty mallard putting on the brakes

    And ruffling up the water, though

    We know our watering hole’s too small,

    And yearly getting smaller, to attract

    A southbound flyer not at all

    Deluded by our wooden replicas.

    At least we may sight the shifting V’s

    And hear the goodbye calls of geese.

    The fall migration’s underway

    And only we must opt to stay.

  • REUTEMANN ROAD POEMS: WILD GEESE

    WILD GEESE CROSSING

    My Lord, what a morning!  The clothes

    Flap in my face, stiffening as I pin

    Them on the crusted line.  Pine branches

    Toss snow all over the patio.

    Across the cobalt blown-glass

    Bowl of sky between the house

    And the mountain, a wedge of geese

    Have etched themselves arrowing north.

    Like squeeze toys they eject staccato

    Cries in the wind’s swelling fist

    That drift down to our ears, tinny

    As the notes of tongs on toy xylophones.

    Forty years younger I stand

    In a college classroom, teaching assistant

    To a gaggle of World War Two veterans

    Bickering over the symbolism of wild geese.

    Take your notebooks to the marshes and the mountains

    I should have told them.  Set your sights

    For the next four decades and then write

    The message of spring and fall migrations.

  • AT HOME: CELEBRITY

    Juncos his advance scouts,
    Royally he drops down
    Flanked by jays to sample
    Seeds, for once a groundling:
    Zebra-striped, scarlet-

    Crowned as Juan Carlos,
    His hair sun colored,
    Alighting from the last car
    Accompanies Holland’s Berenice
    To view the cathedral of Toledo.

    One move and he
    Is gone. Binoculars in hand,
    I wait. The wall clock bongs
    Nine times. The woodpecker
    Is in no hurry to return.